first - trust individual journalists, not news organizations.

this used to be something you could do on Twitter, now you’d want to use Bluesky.

find a journalist whose work you trust. if none come to mind, look at your local news outlets (especially your alt-weekly paper, if possible) and try to find someone doing shoe-leather reporting. going to city council meetings, sending FOIA requests to local government, etc.

look at who they follow. look at the articles they repost, and who they’re written by. follow those people. lather, rinse, repeat. build up a network of journalists you trust. the news organizations they work for will come and go.

that aren’t heavily biased

all journalism is biased.

people read that and think “yeah yeah everyone has political opinions”

but I mean it at a deeper level than that.

say you produce a 30-minute daily TV news show.

there are ~8 billion people in the world. each of them experiences 24 hours of existence, every day.

in order to produce your 30 minute news show, you need to make value judgements about which of those 8 billion people had newsworthy things happen to them.

you want “biased” journalism. because that “bias” is actually value judgements about what is and isn’t newsworthy. part of a journalist’s job is curating that for you, of saying “hey here’s something important that you should pay attention to”

look for journalists that are open about their bias. because doing that means they understand their job and are honest about it. journalists that claim to be objective or unbiased in some way don’t understand the assignment and/or are dishonest about their role in it.

nor full of shit

for this, tune your bullshit detector. because anything or anyone can be full of shit.

Seymour Hersh, famous for reporting on the My Lai massacre (among a lot of other excellent Vietnam-era journalism) took a pretty big downward slide in the past few decades.

so the thing I described above about finding trusted journalists isn’t enough. because you can trust a journalist and they can still produce bullshit.

people have this idea that you need a “balanced” news diet. if one outlet says it’s raining, and another says it’s not raining, you read both, and give yourself a gold star.

except…that doesn’t actually make you more informed about the world.

instead of “balance” you should seek out media criticism. this is how you sharpen your personal bullshit detector - read media criticism written by people who already have good bullshit detectors.

one outlet says it’s raining. another outlet publishes an article criticizing the first, and pointing out that the only source it cited was the journalist looking out their own window, and they didn’t say where their lived. meanwhile the article saying it’s not raining cited the official forecast from the National Weather Service.

NPR’s On The Media podcast is good for this. Knowledge Fight is specific to Alex Jones and similar idiots, but overall it’s a master class in how to dissect misleading information and break down why it’s misleading, and notice the patterns that repeat themselves when someone is trying to feed you bullshit.

Michael Hobbes on Bluesky is a good follow - he will take some thinkpiece/article, and highlight specifically how little of the article’s thesis is backed up by concrete, verifiable details.

I like Alec Karakatsanis as well, he wrote an excellent book called Copaganda that is specifically about noticing bullshit in journalism derived from police reporting.

a fun trick that I learned from Alec (it’s mentioned in his book, but I first heard of it years ago in a thread he wrote on Twitter) - skim through an article, and simply make a list of the sources they quote from or cite. frequently you will have what appears to be a long, detailed article…but ultimately it’s based on a single source. and in the context of reporting about crime, that single source is almost always “police say”.

look at how those sources are found, as well. sometimes it’ll be an official spokesperson for some group, that’s obvious. other times it’ll be “guy who owns a sandwich shop in the neighborhood” or something like that. and, how did that source get there? what was the value judgement that led to that guy being included in the article, instead of someone else? often you’ll have lazy journalists who’ll quote friends or friends-of-friends in articles, and launder the source to make it sound like they’re a representative “area citizen” or whatever.

If you care about small newcomers, 404 Media could be worth a look.

https://www.404media.co/

Wikipedia actually! I’ve been reading Portal:Current Events almost daily for years unless I’m in a self-care mode. The editors seem to choose sources of original reporting about the topics fairly well and the timeline lets me go back and skim everything that happened during a news break.

Can’t say enough good things about Democracy Now! with Amy Goodman and their incredible team. Wish I would have known about them sooner since they’ve been around a few decades. I get my news every day from them via listening to their radio broadcast/subscribing to their email list cause I can’t stomach watching the news if it’s not The Daily Show or Last Week Tonight (not news ofc). Their site has a ton of amazing content and it’s free. Highly suggest donating to them if you can: https://www.democracynow.org/

For me in the UK:

• BBC News is okay, but it can sometimes tie itself in knots trying to be it’s definition of “unbiased” and gets slated by both the left and right for it. There was a specific controversy recently where they were accused of bowing to the government.

• I like The Guardian. It’s left-leaning in it’s opinions, but not to the extent of overly spinning the truth.

• In the last few days I’ve actually been trying out Al Jazeera. Early days, but I’ve been very impressed by how ‘dry’ their articles are - very matter-of-fact without spin, unlike the usual Western style.

My go-to is The Guardian. It’s not perfect, but it’s reporting is usually well done and fairly comprehensive.

How do you all feel about Reuters, Associated Press, National Public Radio and BBC

Recommend them all. They’re pretty unbiased and highly credible. I’m also a monthly donor to NPR :)

I tend to just stick to the wire services (Reuters, AP) and fill in with NPR/BBC and some local news stations that aren’t owned by Sinclair. I tend to avoid any and all that have clear bias or try to appeal to emotion. I just want the verified facts.

For topics related to technology and privacy, TechDirt is pretty solid. They don’t pull punches and are very well researched.

I’ll edit this comment if I think of any more specific ones.

The Financial Times. It’s the newspaper used by capitalists the world over for reliable business news which they can use to inform their business decisions. It can’t be bullshit or very powerful people would lose a lot of money. I look over a few news sites every day and pretty consistently the first several contain what capitalists want you to know and the FT is what the capitalists themselves want to know. They assume their audience is capitalists so there isn’t any need for bullshit propaganda, just the real business news. It’s probably the most objective look into the events which will end up driving the rest of the news. The opinion columns are predictable though, being a capitalist circle-jerk.

Edit: The site is paywalled and subscriptions are deliberately more expensive than the average person can afford. I like archive.ph .

It’s good to not just look at apparently non biased sources. All sources have a bias in some way. So, instead try to know the bias of all outlets you look at, or come across.

I like the economist. A lot of their stuff is biased but their political coverage is very even handed and appears minimally biased. The also offer coverage of areas that are often not covered in more mainstream media, which is a bias in itself.

For military news, Perun is one of the more objective voices in this space.

https://www.youtube.com/@PerunAU/videos